Risk factors of mortality and recoarctation after coarctation repair in infancy

The main challenge of aortic coarctation (CoA) repair in infants is to obtain durable results without morbidity. We aimed to describe predictors of aortic arch reintervention after aortic CoA repair. Between January 2000 and March 2014, we retrospectively included consecutive infants with isolated CoA or CoA with ventricular septal defect (CoA + VSD) who had surgical repair of the aortic arch before 3 months of age. Five hundred and thirty patients were included: 308 (58%) patients had isolated CoA and 222 (42%) patients had CoA + VSD. Three hundred and eighty-five patients (72.6%) had CoA repair, 51 patients (9.6%) had CoA repair with closure of VSD and 94 patients (17.8%) had CoA repair with pulmonary artery banding. Mean age at operation was 13 ± 1.6 days, with 294 patients (55.5%) operated on before 2 weeks. Median follow-up was 7.57 years. Sixty-one patients (11.5%) needed reintervention on the aortic arch. Freedom from aortic arch reintervention was 90% at 1 year and 88.5% at 5 years. Proportions of aortic arch reintervention were similar in the different surgical strategy groups (P = 0.80). However, in patients receiving prostaglandin E1 (PGE1), the end-to-end repair was at higher risk of recoarctation compared to the extended end-to-side repair (P = 0.033). The risk factors of aortic arch reintervention were age at repair